Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities. Video Essays. Introduction to the Special Issue

The article provides an introduction to the second of a pair of special issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which contains ten video essays and prose guiding texts. The article describes the variety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the venues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It gestures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with special reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key reflexive moment in Eric S. Faden’s (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create scholarly audiovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the video essays and some of the features, concerns or approaches shared between and across those contents. The video essays derive from fields including videographic criticism, anthropology, experimental cinema, and participatory and activist filmmaking.